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The Dire Wolf is Back! (well, kinda...)

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I saw the headlines making the rounds and figured it was some overstated bs. Revitalizing a species from 12,000 years ago seems like it would be the biggest human achievement of all time by a lot. Creating enough explosion to propel a metal tube to the moon? Impressive but makes sense. Taking DNA from a fossil and recreating an entire species? That's Jurassic Park level sci-fi. Then I saw CNN post it and thought, seriously? Took a closer look, then reevaluated the CNN headline, and well, okay, I guess it's something? Nothing close to the other headlines. 

 

“There’s no secret that across the genome, this is 99.9% gray wolf. There is going to be an argument in the scientific community regarding how many genes need to be changed to make a dire wolf, but this is really a philosophical question,” Dalén said."

 

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/07/science/dire-wolf-de-extinction-cloning-colossal/index.html

Edited by 'stache

13 minutes ago, freyguy said:

I thought dire wolves had glowing eyes?

20250405_173723.thumb.jpg.27c9f4d0f0ae80b7d63c5a05017de427.jpg

They used frog DNA.  Some west African frogs have been known to spontaneously change sexes in a single sex environment.  Nature finds a way.

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1 hour ago, 'stache said:

I saw the headlines making the rounds and figured it was some overstated bs. Revitalizing a species from 12,000 years ago seems like it would be the biggest human achievement of all time by a lot. Creating enough explosion to propel a metal tube to the moon? Impressive but makes sense. Taking DNA from a fossil and recreating an entire species? That's Jurassic Park level sci-fi. Then I saw CNN post it and thought, seriously? Took a closer look, then reevaluated the CNN headline, and well, okay, I guess it's something? Nothing close to the other headlines. 

“There’s no secret that across the genome, this is 99.9% gray wolf. There is going to be an argument in the scientific community regarding how many genes need to be changed to make a dire wolf, but this is really a philosophical question,” Dalén said."

Every press release this company has had is techbro bullshit. They are hyping up the same thing with elephants and saying they will make mammoths. When you see the next one from the same company, it's going to be bullshit too. What this company is doing is not science, it's pumping up their share price. 

They used a program called CRISPR to make 20 edits to 14 genes (out of at least 20,000 functional genes) of a modern gray wolf. It's not 99.9% gray wolf, it's a gray wolf. 

@LTbear might have more insight, but it doesn't look at all like a dire wolf to me. My favorite museum display in the world is at the La Brea Tar Pits. ~400 dire wolf skulls all mounted on the same backlit wall. I couldn't calculate the number of hours I've spent looking at the variation between those skulls. The snout of these gray wolves is way too small and gracile. 

image.png.0a8abbcd7967d6613f9d2df98807b82b.png

image.png.140c9fe92b9ae9318090ae34725cf128.png

Plus, recent DNA work (2021) suggests that modern wolves are not the closest living relatives of dire wolves. Dire wolves are evolutionarily closer to jackals and African wild dogs than modern wolves. We share more DNA with chimpanzees than wolves share with dire wolves.

Here's a pdf of the Nature paper. https://tinylink.net/gHM90

Science magazine's take. https://www.science.org/content/article/legendary-dire-wolf-may-not-have-been-wolf-all 

That pdf is freely available online and got enough publicity that Colossal is definitely aware of it.

If they wanted to be accurate, they should have modified jackal DNA to reconstruct this, but that wouldn't generate an absurd share price for the company. 

 

That wall at La Brea is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.  Shit, La Brea is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.  I'd been reading about it since I was 4, and I visited it for the first time in my late 40s...and I was agog like a little kid.

And yeah, your summary is pretty much what I suspected here - lots of hype, but not lots of great science.

So does this mean we can use Chimpanzees to bring back Sharon Tate?

Spoiler

s-l400.png

 

Here's a cladogram from the Nature paper, you can think of it as a family tree. From left to right is time. The branches show how closely related they are to each other. Each place the branches diverge represents the common ancestor for that group and the number represents how many millions of years ago the split occurred. For example, Andean foxes split from everyone else 6.8 million years ago.

Dire wolves split from everyone else 5.7 million years ago. The grey wolf is WAY up the family tree from dire wolves. They are not very close at all. 

image.png.a0fddeee6281fb6b8f1cf2478ad443f6.png 

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15 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

That wall at La Brea is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.  Shit, La Brea is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.  I'd been reading about it since I was 4, and I visited it for the first time in my late 40s...and I was agog like a little kid.

And yeah, your summary is pretty much what I suspected here - lots of hype, but not lots of great science.

It's amazing.  I took my daughter for the first time a couple of summers ago.  She was ten.   The gentleman working the desk was really nice, and told her he was running a special that day and if a kid could tell a joke that makes him laugh he will let them and their parent in for free.   My daughter did not hesitate and launched into the following highly inappropriate joke:

"What do you say to a man in a wheelchair who is wearing camouflage?   -  You can hide, but you can't run!"

I had never heard that joke and don't know where she picked it up.  My immediate response was to laugh out loud but I stifled it while becoming worried this guy was about to kick us out, or at the least judge me for being a terrible father and scold my kid.  He didn't move for what felt like ten minutes but was just a sizable pregnant pause, and then he burst a gut laughing his ass off and let us in for free.    

Edited by Samson's Wig

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29 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

That wall at La Brea is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.  Shit, La Brea is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.  I'd been reading about it since I was 4, and I visited it for the first time in my late 40s...and I was agog like a little kid.

For anyone that hasn't been, it's a small museum, but definitely worth the admission price. All the outside stuff is free and you can often see a crew digging in one of the pits. 

La Brea is what's called a predator trap. Something gets stuck and predators show up to eat it. They get stuck and other things show up to eat them and also get stuck. As a result, there are lot of dire wolves (over 4,000) and other predators. 

Each bone in this picture is the same Golden Eagle foot bone from a different fossil specimen. Bones like this are so fragile, they almost never preserve. 

image.png.01dc988ba5b0c38a6015c1221770dec1.png

It really is incredible. You'll never see another museum like it. 

35 minutes ago, Pods said:

For example, Andean foxes split from everyone else 6.8 million years ago.

Fuckin' Andean foxes, always thinking they're better than everyone else.  Elitist assholes.

 

12 minutes ago, Pods said:

Here's a cladogram from the Nature paper, you can think of it as a family tree. From left to right is time. The branches show how closely related they are to each other. Each place the branches diverge represents the common ancestor for that group and the number represents how many millions of years ago the split occurred. For example, Andean foxes split from everyone else 6.8 million years ago.

Dire wolves split from everyone else 5.7 million years ago. The grey wolf is WAY up the family tree from dire wolves. They are not very close at all. 

image.png.a0fddeee6281fb6b8f1cf2478ad443f6.png 

 

Your fancy cladogram is missing The Wolfen. 

 

Last one and I'll quit hijacking the thread with La Brea chat, but this helps show how absurd the preservation is.

This a 3D model of a 14,000 year old leaf cutter bee made from very high resolution CT scans. Each slice is 3 microns thick. 

Left is the eye, right is the abdomen. The flat spot in the middle is one of the wings. There are individual pollen grains and full internal organ system preserved. There is so much preserved detail, scanning and processing them crashed a supercomputer. 

image.png.1f0df845b4dd07f753dd8977e40ff9d3.png

Red arrow is the eye. Blue is the wing. Orange is the abdomen. image.png.5e9dee7fd33b9a2de2c3fa4481d01ea1.png

Edited by Pods

3 hours ago, freyguy said:

I thought dire wolves had glowing eyes?

That's not true, but they are apparently great at jury selection

 

1 hour ago, Goredho said:

So does this mean we can use Chimpanzees to bring back Sharon Tate?

  Hide contents

s-l400.png

 

She has a little poop nugget in her ass crack. Would not bang 

New York Yankees Thumbs Down GIF by MLB

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Speaking of poop nuggets, my 2 year-old just shit in the bathtub as I was getting ready to respond with how much I enjoyed La Brea.

As an Ultima Online player I’m reassured by he responses in this thread that it’s not a true dire wolf.  

1 hour ago, hookem2010 said:

Speaking of poop nuggets, my 2 year-old just shit in the bathtub tar pit as I was getting ready to respond with how much I enjoyed La Brea.

Impeccable timing!!!

3 hours ago, MissingInAction said:

Anyone who has actually seen a wolf knows this is horseshit.

They are fucking YUGE!

I have no idea what this click bait fuckery is 

I hate to be the one to point this out, but I think you know exactly what that click bait fuckery is... but because I am all about educating minds:

How to improve your click bait fuckery

6 hours ago, Pods said:

Last one and I'll quit hijacking the thread with La Brea chat, but this helps show how absurd the preservation is.

This a 3D model of a 14,000 year old leaf cutter bee made from very high resolution CT scans. Each slice is 3 microns thick. 

Left is the eye, right is the abdomen. The flat spot in the middle is one of the wings. There are individual pollen grains and full internal organ system preserved. There is so much preserved detail, scanning and processing them crashed a supercomputer. 

image.png.1f0df845b4dd07f753dd8977e40ff9d3.png

Red arrow is the eye. Blue is the wing. Orange is the abdomen. image.png.5e9dee7fd33b9a2de2c3fa4481d01ea1.png

Breaking Bad Aaron GIF

7 hours ago, Pods said:

Every press release this company has had is techbro bullshit. They are hyping up the same thing with elephants and saying they will make mammoths. When you see the next one from the same company, it's going to be bullshit too. What this company is doing is not science, it's pumping up their share price. 

They used a program called CRISPR to make 20 edits to 14 genes (out of at least 20,000 functional genes) of a modern gray wolf. It's not 99.9% gray wolf, it's a gray wolf. 

@LTbear might have more insight, but it doesn't look at all like a dire wolf to me. My favorite museum display in the world is at the La Brea Tar Pits. ~400 dire wolf skulls all mounted on the same backlit wall. I couldn't calculate the number of hours I've spent looking at the variation between those skulls. The snout of these gray wolves is way too small and gracile. 

image.png.0a8abbcd7967d6613f9d2df98807b82b.png

image.png.140c9fe92b9ae9318090ae34725cf128.png

Plus, recent DNA work (2021) suggests that modern wolves are not the closest living relatives of dire wolves. Dire wolves are evolutionarily closer to jackals and African wild dogs than modern wolves. We share more DNA with chimpanzees than wolves share with dire wolves.

Here's a pdf of the Nature paper. https://tinylink.net/gHM90

Science magazine's take. https://www.science.org/content/article/legendary-dire-wolf-may-not-have-been-wolf-all 

That pdf is freely available online and got enough publicity that Colossal is definitely aware of it.

If they wanted to be accurate, they should have modified jackal DNA to reconstruct this, but that wouldn't generate an absurd share price for the company. 

 

Spot on here. They're barely tweaking a modern wolf genome, which is already about as closely related to a dire wolf as I am to an orangutan. Coyotes are dramatically closer to a wolf than a dire wolf is. (For those that find this odd, just realize that dire wolves are called dire wolves because the first time we found their bones, they "looked" like large, off wolves, but as @Pods pointed out, the DNA evidence has now shown they're actually much more distantly related.)

This research is interesting in some respects, but it is not even 10% of what the headlines are making it out to be.

Edited by LTbear

"Canis lupus!”

“Vulpes Vulpes!”

fox-fantastic.gif

 

58 minutes ago, LTbear said:

Spot on here. They're barely tweaking a modern wolf genome, which is already about as closely related to a dire wolf as I am to an orangutan. Coyotes are dramatically closer to a wolf than a dire wolf is. (For those that find this odd, just realize that dire wolves are called dire wolves because the first time we found their bones, they "looked" like large, off wolves, but as @Pods pointed out, the DNA evidence has now shown they're actually much more distantly related.)

This research is interesting in some respects, but it is not even 10% of what the headlines are making it out to be.

So this story is the torpedo bats (which have been around for a long time) of this week?

And don’t I feel stupid thinking that dire wolves were a made up animal name by George R.R. Martin. Next you will tell me that we all descended from White Walkers. (No racism intended.)

Edited by Nice Guy Eddie

2 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

And don’t I feel stupid thinking that dire wolves were a made up animal name by George R.R. Martin. Next you will tell me that we all descended from White Walkers. (No racism intended.)

Well, there was a lot of incest in the royalty.  Maybe not brother/sister incest, but still a lot of incest.

3 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

And don’t I feel stupid thinking that dire wolves were a made up animal name by George R.R. Martin. Next you will tell me that we all descended from White Walkers. (No racism intended.)

We gingers are as close as we'll get to White Walkers.

Edited by MissingInAction
Aßssssss

36 minutes ago, MissingInAction said:

We gingers are as close as we'll get to White Walkers.

The Game of Thrones has a lot in common with England and Scotland. Redheads in Scotland kept out of England via Hadrian's Wall. Before it was Scotland and England. Hadrian's wall just might have 10 ft not 500 ft tall.

Edited by Nice Guy Eddie

1 minute ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

The Game of Thrones has a lot in common with England and Scotland. Redheads in Scotland kept out of England via Hadrian's Wall. Before it was Scotland and England.

We were confined north of the wall until boats were invented.

They need to get some ancient scorpion and lobster DNA and recreate some lobstrosities like in the Dark Tower.  Dad-a-chum? Dum-a-chum? Ded-a-chek? Did-a-chick?

Edited by Judge Roybeanbag

5 minutes ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

 

Clone that.  Then have her washed and bring her to my tent.

16 hours ago, Surly Bevo said:

So this story is the torpedo bats (which have been around for a long time) of this week?

 

As the starter of the Torpedo bats thread, I think I'm slightly peeved by the point you are making here.

However, now that I think about it, I know more about phylogeny than I do about baseball, so I'm not sure exactly what my feelings are. 

 

 

8 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

The Game of Thrones has a lot in common with England and Scotland. Redheads in Scotland kept out of England via Hadrian's Wall. Before it was Scotland and England. Hadrian's wall just might have 10 ft not 500 ft tall.

Feudalism and the vassal-lord system would not have been feasible in a continent-spanning political entity like Westeros. The Targaryans would have had no need to accept it while they were in sole possession of air domain dominance and would not have tolerated subordinate great houses raising armies and any that tried to do so— either to enforce their own rule in the provinces or march on Kings Landing would have been destroyed while bivouacked and vulnerable. The Targaryens would have established a centralized empire, likely with a small professional standing army to defend the wall and for emergency shows of force or insurgency not requiring dragons and local militia or police forces to maintain order/collect taxes.  They’d also have invested in a navy and trading fleet to defend the continent from external threats and seek revenue other than heavy taxation. 
 

So GoT is bullshit just like the reincarnated dire wolf. 

1 minute ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Feudalism and the vassal-lord system would not have been feasible in a continent-spanning political entity like Westeros. The Targaryans would have had no need to accept it while they were in sole possession of air domain dominance and would not have tolerated subordinate great houses raising armies and any that tried to do so— either to enforce their own rule in the provinces or march on Kings Landing would have been destroyed while bivouacked and vulnerable. The Targaryens would have established a centralized empire, likely with a small professional standing army to defend the wall and for emergency shows of force or insurgency not requiring dragons and local militia or police forces to maintain order/collect taxes.  They’d also have invested in a navy and trading fleet to defend the continent from external threats and seek revenue other than heavy taxation. 
 

So GoT is bullshit just like the reincarnated dire wolf. 

Ugh April Ludgate Reaction GIF

 

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